


Living in the Present

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Presents, Community: holmes_minor, Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 23:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8916883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: Their true gifts to each other cannot be wrapped.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For the Holmes Minor community's December 2016 prompt: **Gift**

A new ivory stem for a favourite pipe, a set of cufflinks, a leather chequebook, a bottle of wine.  
  
Gifts, some would call such items, these tokens we purchase and wrap and hand to each other on the 25th of December. They are not our actual gifts.  
  
Only Watson can gauge the value of the gift I give him, but his own to me is immeasurable and never-ending.  
  
It’s not even the few moments in our association when Watson has literally made a gift to me of my life – pushed me to safety just as a villain fired at us, shot a vicious mastiff, dragged me out of a self-induced descent into fatal madness.  
  
It’s the cup of tea he poured and made me drink when I’d been up all night swathed in tobacco smoke and mental blind-alleys, despairing of saving a client’s life.  
  
It’s the sight of him in his chair, cigar in hand, looking up at me with an endearingly puzzled look that nonetheless radiated absolute trust when he let me soliloquise to his wordless presence as I combed out the knots of a case.  
  
It’s the humming over the scratch of his pen in the same room where I cut out my newspaper stories, a combined sound that settles my mind as nothing else does, and bathes me in peace.  
  
It’s his exclamations of wonder at my deductions that lift my heart at even the most sordid crime scenes.  
  
And most of all, above all these others, it was his shouting that cut off my furious rant one day, saying of course he bloody cut the solution strength of my cocaine in half, that after seeing me end the careers of so many other murderers he wasn’t going to stand by and watch me goddamn murder myself, that I was ending this goddamn filthy habit of mine once and for all, with or without his help. That long, horrid, painful year he put me through, and from which I emerged free of my cocaine addiction after over twenty years, is something I can never repay though we both live to a hundred.  
  
So it is that we observe Christmas at 221b, murmuring our thanks as we unwrap a new dressing-gown or a box of chocolates from San Francisco – even as our gratitude for the true gifts we give each other shine from our eyes without a word.


End file.
